


Help is on the way

by TDaL



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: JayTim Week, Love Notes, M/M, jaytimweek:vde
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-18
Updated: 2017-02-18
Packaged: 2018-09-25 10:53:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9816695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TDaL/pseuds/TDaL
Summary: Jason keeps finding notes meant for him written by Red Robin, usually accompanied with some bad guys tied up together. Who the hell does Tim think he is?





	

Jason was used to strange things. He lived in Gotham and fought crazed psychopaths on a daily basis, after all. Just your regular Tuesday night and shit like that.

Strange things happens, but tonight something threw him off.  Jason arrived at a warehouse where he was going to break up a big weapons deal between Penguin’s goons and Black Mask’s lackeys and finding them all tied up. They were wrapped together in a circle, their hands tied around their backs and a long rope around their waists.

The strangest part of it all was that a note had been tied to one of the goon’s hats.

Since he was so used to dealing with crazies, Jason approached with caution. This could always be some big plot to catch Red Hood off his guard and capture him, after all. It wouldn’t be the first time that it’d happened. He looked around to make sure that there were no trip wires or snipers holed up in the rafters. It was only when he was sure that nothing fishy was going on that Jason stepped forward and grabbed the paper off of the hat. The goon groaned and Jason moved back so he could read what was written on the paper without interruption.  


_\--Present for you. Have fun with it! Red Robin_  
  


“What the hell?” Jason turned the paper around, but there wasn’t anything else on it. Just the one short message. That was it. That was all he was getting.

Jason was dumbstruck. He’d been tracking this lead on his own for days now. It wasn’t unheard of that one of the other Bats would catch wind of something like this, but if they knew that he was working on it they’d always let him know that they were around.

It was kind of a thing that they did. An unspoken deal. Never step into the Red Hood’s business unannounced.

Red Robin knew that well enough. In the past few months they’d been working on quite a few cases together. Most of them were tangentially, but they’d actually teamed up a few times. Jason would never admit out loud that he actually liked having Tim around once in a while, and he was pretty sure that the feeling was mutual.

So where in the hell this had come from, Jason had no idea.

His reverie was broken up by the goon whose hat the paper had been affixed to woke up. “Hood? You and vegas showboy are going to pay! Penguin ain’t gonna let this slide!”

It felt very satisfying to kick the goon in the side of the head to shut him up. “His name’s Red Robin, you numbskull.”

Now Jason had to go and deal with the matter at hand. While he appreciated the help, Tim could’ve waited for him to show up at the very least.

He sighed. He supposed that this was a blessing in disguise. Jason had originally been following a different lead on a string of assaults on prostitutes, but this had come up instead. Now that this was taken care of Jason could at least deal with the more pressing issue in his mind. The guns were off the streets. Now he had to make sure that the douchebag who was hurting girls paid for it.

He’d deal with Tim another time. Jason slipped the note into his breast pocket and grappled his way out of the warehouse.

-

The thing was that he didn’t really have time to talk to Tim. If they weren’t actively seeking other out, they never really crossed paths that much. It also didn’t help that when Jason was actually state-side, Tim seemed to either be with the Titans or working with Bruce. Neither of which were Jason’s biggest fans and neither of which Jason really felt the need to meet up with.

So the issue remained unmentioned. Not that Jason had really minded in the end, because he’d managed to catch the scumbag that’d be hurting the prostitutes the night that Tim had left him the so called ‘present’. It’d been a big help in the end.

Jason decided to let it slide, since it was unlikely to happen again.

Except that it did.

He’d gone in to blow up a warehouse where some bozo’s were producing impure ecstasy, and hopefully kick a few heads in as well, but when he’d gotten there the heads of the operation were already tied up outside.

“What the fuck.” Jason spotted another note and he stalked over to it, ripping it off of one of the men’s chest. There was a small remote taped to the paper and Jason pulled that off as well.  


_\--Warehouse primed and ready to blow. Building has been cleared. All you need to do is push the button. Have Fun! Red Robin_  
  


“What. The. Fuck.” Jason said again.

What was this bullshit? Once was definitely something that Jason could write off, but twice? He needed to stop this before it actually became a thing. Tim was making Jason look like a fool. Did he really think that Jason couldn’t deal with his cases on his own? That was completely and utterly wrong. Jason could handle himself fine, thank you very much.

Hadn’t he proven that at least a dozen times over? To Tim personally when they’d worked together?

Jason really didn’t know what was going on.

He wasn’t sure how to deal with it either. Maybe this was just Tim’s weird way of showing appreciation? Who knew what really went on in that analytical mind of his? Tim was way too smart for his own good and it was going to get him hurt. Had gotten him hurt a few times already.

Jason almost crumpled the note in his hand, but he sighed and stuffed it in his breast pocket. It was better to keep it as evidence to rub in Tim’s face. There was no way that Tim would be able to deny what he was doing then. Except he probably wasn’t going to deny it. Jason could already see the self-satisfied grin that Tim would probably have.

Maybe he should deal with this a little more carefully, as not to burst Tim’s bubble. The problem was that Tim always meant well. He just needed to figure out better ways of showing it.

Jason would show him.

Once he figured out a way not to sound like a total asshole. If Tim was trying, so would he.

Of course, he still used the remote to blow up the warehouse. There might not have been satisfaction in rigging the place up to blow himself, but there would always be a curl of delight in his gut when Jason made something explode.

It was the simple things in life.

-

Nothing happened again for the next few weeks, even though Jason had been on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary.

Maybe the notes and Tim doing his job for him had gone as suddenly as it had come? Jason could only hope that it was the case. He didn’t know if he could really handle Tim butting into his business anymore. The little bird was already nosy enough as it was. There definitely didn’t need to be any more encouragement.

The thing was that Jason still hadn’t gotten around to actually talking to Tim about said notes.

That was his first mistake.

Another mistake was thinking that he was able to do his own damn work in Gotham City without any of the other Bats finding out about it. Even if Jason had been working very hard to keep his head down.

It had been a normal night. It had been a busy night, but which night hadn’t been busy for Jason in the last few months? Jason should have known better. Should have known that everything going the way that it was supposed to was just another bad omen.

So he’d trudged up the fire escape and climbed through the window to get in his latest safe house, only to find that it’d been compromised.

Now when someone thinks about a safe house being compromised you’d think that there’d be an enemy or a nosy family member standing by the window with their arms crossed, brows furrowed and a frown on their face. It’d happened often enough. Jason had been careful with picking his safe houses, and he made sure never to use the same one for longer than a few weeks.

Jason climbed into the safe house that he’d been using for all of ten days to find a hard drive on his kitchen counter. A hard drive with another of those damned notes on it.

He closed the window behind him and pulled his gun out of his holster. The first thought in his mind was that Tim was up to no good again, but there was always a chance that it was something far more sinister. It was just Jason’s damned luck that it wasn’t – although there was a part of him that had almost hoped a ninja had broken into his safe house with the intent attempting to kick the living shit out of him.

Jason didn’t even have to grab the note to recognize the handwriting. He’d gotten pretty familiar with it that past few months.

Jason groaned, holstering his weapon and whisking the hard drive and note off of the counter.  


_\--Found this info. Thought it might come in handy for your latest job. RR_  
  


This was not the way that they did things. This was not the way that they worked together. This was not the way that Red Hood and Red Robin worked together, or even how Jason Todd and Tim Drake worked together.

It was starting to get on Jason’s nerves.

And this was the last straw.

Jason didn’t have a direct link to any of the other Bats. Whenever he worked with them he always got a separate ear piece or his would be hacked. It just so happened that he did have a way to contact their resident hacker. Jason pulled out one of his disposable phones from a bag that he always carried with him between safe houses and he called her up.

“Hood. What do you want?”

What a welcome. Jason pulled his helmet off before he spoke. “Aw, what makes you think that I want anything?”

The snort that came from the other side of the line was on the borderline of being indignant. “You never call me otherwise.”

“Touché.” Jason couldn’t really deny the truth. “I need a direct link up to our favorite little stalker, Barbie.”

“He’s preoccupied. Superboy called him in two hours ago,” Babs said, and Jason could just imagine the way that she was rolling her eyes at him.

“He can multitask.” Jason wasn’t going to leave this alone any longer. If he just kept waiting to actually see Tim and talk to him about what he was doing, it was going to take forever and a day.

For a second Jason thought that Babs might have actually hung up on him. He didn’t hear anything. Not a snort, or a groan. Not even a sigh. Babs always seemed to have those kinds of things stored for whenever they talked, so it was weird that he heard nothing.

Suddenly there was a click and a grunt, one that was very distinctly not female. “Oracle?”

“Nope. Just your favorite neighbour,” Jason said. Maybe he should send Babs a thank you pizza or something. Was the restaurant in Midtown that she liked still even open? He’d have to find out.

“Hood? This is kind of-” Tim grunted again.

“A bad time? I don’t really care. Look. We’ve got to talk about these notes you’ve been leaving behind.” Jason opened up the fridge and held the phone up between his shoulder and chin as he riffled through it to grab something to drink. Preferably something a little bit stronger.

The sound that came ringing through the speaker was a lot more breathy this time. Almost like a moan. What the hell was Tim doing to make sounds like that? “Ja-Hood. I can explain. R-really.”

“I’m waiting,” Jason said as he kicked the fridge shut and used the counter to pop of the top of his beer.

“The notes a-are…” Tim trailed off for a moment before there was another breathy sound.

Now this was just getting ridiculous. “Did you pick up in the middle of sex?” There was no other explanation.

“W-what? No! No, I didn’t!”

“Sure sounds like it. Did Superboy pick you up for a booty call?” It wouldn’t surprise Jason, but the idea of it didn’t sit well with him either. Not because he had a problem with the idea of Kon and Tim having sex, but part of him was a little jealous. Of who he didn’t exactly know.

“It’s not like that! Look, Jas-Hood.” Jason could hear Tim gritting his teeth. “I’ll call you back!”

Then Tim hung up on him. Actually hung up on him, after all the trouble that Jason had gone through to contact him. Jason tapped the side of the beer bottle as he pulled the phone away. Well, that was rude.

Except now he couldn’t get the image of Kon and Tim getting it on. Jason wasn’t going to deny that they were both good looking. Them together in any sense was hot as well. They’d been friends for years now, Jason knew that much.

“Good for them,” Jason muttered before he sipped at his beer. It tasted a little dull.

\--

Jason waited for a week for Tim to call back, but he never did. He didn’t know if he was bothered by it per se, but Jason had wanted to settle things between them. Maybe Tim had just been too embarrassed to call back.

There were a million reasons why.

The thing was that Jason thought that the note leaving finally would’ve ended with that, but it didn’t.

The next note that he found was taped to a shipping container filled with illegal weaponry bound for Gotham’s underworld.  


_\--Everything accounted for. The other container arrives on the twenty-fourth. Happy hunting! RR_  
  


It was ridiculous. It was stupid, and definitely stalker-like, and-

“I don’t know what to do!” Jason complained to Roy. In his annoyance he’d called his teammate up. Since this had started he hadn’t told anyone, but now Jason was at wits end.

“Dude, Jaybird, why would you want to do anything about it? Sounds like a walk in the park,” Roy said.

“I don’t want it to be a walk in the park! I want to do my damn job. Not have someone else do everything for me and I’m left to pick up the pieces,” Jason said. It was very unsatisfying.

Roy chuckled, obviously amused by Jason’s predicament. “Okay. Go over it again.”

Jason sighed in exasperation, but he told Roy again. He’d even pulled the notes out from where he’d been keeping them so Jason could read them out to Roy. On Roy’s insistence he went through every single note and how he’d found them, and which cases he’d been working on at the time.

After he was finished Roy was silent, probably taking everything into that big brain of his. Roy suddenly snorted and started laughing. “Holy shit! Oh my god!”

“What? What is it?” How did Roy expect Jason to get anything out of that?

Roy’s laughter picked up into guffaws and Jason had to pull the phone away from his ear. As if Roy wasn’t already boisterous enough. “The kid’s totally leaving you love letters!”

Jason held himself back from flinging the phone at the wall. “What?”

“He’s smitten with you!”

“You’re not making any sense!” Jason snapped out.

It took a few moments for Roy to calm down enough so he could speak coherently. “Okay. I need you to listen to me, and not interrupt me.”

“Roy-”

“Shush!” Jason clenched his jaw, but stayed silent. “Okay. Let’s break this down. You’ve been busy as hell these past few months. So much so that you’ve complained about it. Now you complain about a lot of things, but this is like, really something for once, right? Anyways, somehow the little birdie caught wind of that, because isn’t he just a web of knowledge with feelers everywhere? Out of the goodness of his heart he decides to start helping you out. And not just helping you out by doing your shit for you. Oh no, he actually goes out of his way to leave little personalized notes for you!”

Jason waited for Roy to continue, but it seemed that he’d stopped rambling for now. “That’s great and all, but what’s your point?”

Roy growled and Jason heard something that he was pretty sure was Roy’s palm connecting with his forehead. “My point is that Red Robin – that Tim – likes you! Like, like likes you.”

“You’re pulling that out of your ass,” Jason said. Roy was reaching way too far right now. There was no way that Tim liked him in that way. “Besides, he’s fucking Superboy.”

“Do you know what for sure?” Roy asked.

“No, but-”

Roy shushed him again. “No buts! I’d say go out of your way to find him. Maybe beat him at his own game, y’know? Who knows, maybe you’ll get some fun out of it.” Roy started laughing again.

“Roy.” Jason didn’t get another word in as Roy just kept laughing louder. “Harper! I don’t even know why I called you! You’re such a useless friend!”

“Aw, you love me Jaybird.”

Why was Jason friends with this asshole again? He didn’t even know. Jason hung up the phone as he stared up at the ceiling. The thing was that Roy was good at these kinds of things. He picked up on things that Jason often didn’t. It was part of the reason why Jason had originally let him stick around.

Roy was most definitely wrong about Tim having the hots for him, but he was right about one thing.

This wasn’t going to blow over until Jason actively did something about it. Beating Tim at his own game had a very nice ring to it as well.

-

It wasn’t too hard to figure out what Tim was working on. All Jason had to do was ‘randomly’ bump into Batgirl some time during the night. He and Stephanie got along well enough and she was always open to talking about her favorite boy wonder. It didn’t take much prying for her to tell him that was working on a trafficking group and that he’d gotten close to figuring out where they’d been holing up.

Jason thanked Stephanie and broke off from her after a while, citing that he needed to work on his own cases. She’d made him promise that they’d meet up for milkshakes one day, but that wasn’t really much of a problem at all.

Jason had some contacts that he hit up and soon enough he managed to narrow his area of searching to a specific shipyard.

From what Jason had heard from Stephanie, Tim wasn’t planning on assaulting the warehouse until the next night. Something about planning and contingencies. A little too much work for the small operation that was working in Jason’s mind.

Tim wouldn’t be out on the streets after he’d finished up his duties at Wayne Enterprises, so Jason went out early to mop up the mess.

It hadn’t been hard to all. Which made Jason wondering what all this nonsense about planning was about. Maybe Tim was actually expecting more resistance, but this was just the bare bones of the operation for now. There couldn’t have been more than a dozen guys in the warehouse. Jason had taken care of them pretty easily and he decided to replicate the first scene that he’d come across courtesy of Tim.

He dragged the men to a set of beams and tied them to it. Only one of them had woken up in between and tried to run off, but Jason very efficiently took care of him before he got too far. No one would really protest too much about his broken ankle.

Once everything was set up, Jason wrote out his own note.  


_\--RR, present for you. Red Hood_  
  


Simple and to the point, just like Tim’s had been. Jason made sure that the note would be visible and he pulled back to hide. It probably wouldn’t take long before Tim got here.

Jason was wrong, yet again. He seemed to be getting a lot of things wrong about Tim lately. He’d expected Red Robin to come flying in pretty soon after he’d come out, but it was well into the night – or morning depending on who you asked – when he finally deigned to show up.

The first indication that Tim had arrived was the whooshing of his cape. It wasn’t a sound that you’d pick up if you weren’t looking for it, but Jason had been around enough caped people that he recognized it immediately. It was another few minutes later that Tim actually came into view. He’d probably seen what Jason had set up and been cautious.

He walked up to the group of men and pulled the note off of the man’s chest that Jason had pinned it to. Even though Tim’s mask was hiding his eyes, Jason was able to see the surprise by the way that his eyebrows rose. Surprise which was quickly followed by a small smile.

Now it was Jason’s turn to step up.

“Y’know, if you wanted to ask me out you could’ve just asked.” Jason had decided that he’d trust Roy’s intuition for once. It’d only failed him a few times and he could totally pin all of this on Roy if it didn’t go the way that he expected.

Tim immediately reacted, taking a step back and pulling his bo staff out. Once he turned and saw that it was Jason that came out from behind some crates he relaxed. “Hood?”

“Red Robin.” Jason knew full well that Tim heard what he said. There wasn’t much that went past him.

“I was just helping you out,” Tim said.

“Uh huh.” Jason stepped in closer, holding his hands behind his back as he leaned towards Tim. He could only imagine how Tim’s mind must be working on overdrive.

Tim’s mouth opened and closed a few times before he actually managed to say something. “Look, Hood. It doesn’t have to mean anything. I just…”

Wow. So Roy had actually been right, which meant he’d be crowing in delight next time that Jason called him up. “So you left me tied up bad guys and love notes. How sweet of you, Red Robin.”

He was just able to see the red creep up on Tim’s cheeks. “They aren’t love notes!”

“So what are they?” Jason pressed Tim.

“They’re- They’re actually…”

Jason took pity on Tim and wrapped his arm around Tim’s shoulders, pulling the smaller vigilante up against his side. “How about we talk about it over a drink?”

“I can’t drink yet, remember?” Tim said with a snort.

“I never said it had to be alcoholic.” Jason tugged Tim and started moving towards the exit of the warehouse. “So, tell me, you’re really not fucking Superboy right?”

“I’m not fucking Superboy!”

“Good. That means I don’t have to kick his ass.”

“Hood!”

**Author's Note:**

> I am a dumpster collecting trash. Join me on [Tumblr](http://flashthroughlight.tumblr.com/).


End file.
